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Here's my current Writers' Program class: Advanced Non-Fiction - and oh, what a talented bunch of writers they are. Some are getting published (more about that later) and all have memoirs or essays in progress.

In the fall I'll be teaching Writing the Healing Story, and in February at the four day intensive Writer's Studio: Writing the Personal Essay.

And then there's that other gig: (see previous posts if this confuses you.)

Vivian Gornick believes that you cannot teach people how to express themselves in a dramatic way or how to find structure for a memoir, but that you can teach them how to read and how to judge a piece of writing. Which of course translates into judging their own writing as well, and with hope, making it more expressive and finding structure for it.

“What is this all about?” she asks holding up a memoir manuscript a student is working on. When the student replies, “It’s about this family….” , Gornick says, “No, no. What is it about?”

What is it that makes a piece of writing larger than its immediate story? What is the inner purpose, what connects this story to something larger than the family being written about? What is the compelling reason for people to read this memoir? Why are you writing it?

These are the questions we have to ask ourselves over and over as we write.

*

“Writing enters into us when it gives us information about ourselves that we are in need of at the time we are reading.” – Vivian Gornick

The fear of going back into your past – reliving trauma or grief – sometimes can block writing about the most important part of your story.

Carl Jung made the comparison of James Joyce and his daughter, who was schizophrenic, as two people in a river – the daughter was falling and could drown and the other, Joyce, who had written the dreamlike narrative of Finnegan’s Wake, was diving.

To go back to pain is diving in cold, dangerous water and a swift current, but ultimately you’re in charge of the dive and can return to the surface.

(from A Year of Writing Dangerously)

*

If you're in west L. A. tonight 5/25, come join us for a reading from Victoria Zackheim's wonderful new anthology, He Said What? at Barnes & Noble on Third St. in Santa Monica. 7:00. Tomorrow night we're reading at Book Soup on Sunset Boulevard.

I'm working on the final draft of A Year of Writing Dangerously and just came across this entry about driving up to Lake Arrowhead for the writers retreat last fall.

* * *

61. Retreating to Play

Driving up to the mountains to conduct a writers retreat, I hear a commercial on the radio, something about health - about how we all need to play to be healthier, but that as we grow up, gathering information takes precedence over being creative, and we stop playing.

It’s the perfect opening idea for a writers retreat – let’s play! Ideally at a retreat you let go of outside information; you listen to yourself. You let go of what you should know, need to learn. You play. You create.

I once did writing workshops in an elementary school and it was the kindergarteners and kids in the early grades who knew how to play with words. “A horn sounds red!” one wrote. “Mad is like touching the devil,” another wrote. “Mad is so bad it tastes like liver.” By the time they got to third grade they were obsessing about whether to write their names in the upper left hand or right hand corner of the page.

Billy Collins says, "I have no work habits whatsoever...The poem will come along when it arrives. I don't write every day. I try to be on the lookout for creative opportunities, something that might trigger a poem, but I don't sit down in the morning and try to commit an act of literature before lunch."

Annie Proulx doesn’t have a routine either. “I struggle to find time to write,” she says. “Yesterday I had a lot of writing to do and I couldn’t do it because a neighboring ranch called to say they were going to put bulls out in the pasture there. So I had to get over to the bridge over Jack Crick and let down the panels across the stream to stop the bulls from coming through onto my property. And that’s what happened to the afternoon. So I don’t have a set schedule for writing.”

On the other hand, Jonathan Franzen starts writing at seven every morning and works six or seven days a week, and Flannery O’Conner once wrote to a friend: "I'm a full-time believer in writing habits, pedestrian as it all may sound. You may be able to do without them if you have genius but most of us only have talent and this is simply something that has to be assisted all the time by physical and mental habits or it dries up and blows away.”

* * *

and just published: (Victoria Zackheim is editor and I have an essay in it.)

We had a memorial for my teacher Norma Almquist at my house yesterday. It was one of those perfect California days: bright sun, warm, a breeze, the ocean and sky a clear zinging blue. We sat out in the garden and read Norma’s poems and her niece Nancy with her husband Ed talked about her amazing life, and her grand-nieces and a great-grand-niece talked about camping trips and how much attention and love Norma had given them. How she had taught them about nature and music and given them wonderful books and the advice to be bold and fearless, to go wherever they needed to go. I talked about how she had changed my life and turned me into a writer, and then read the poem about her grandmother (a few posts below.) As I read it I choked up realizing how many of the people sitting in front of me were the descendants of Nettie Rice White.

All afternoon and into the evening as we ate and drank we talked about how Norma with her music, her poems, her teaching, her absolutely positive view of life and amazing laugh had enriched our lives.

Today I read a quote by Lewis Thomas in Roger Rosenblatt’s Unless It Moves the Human Heart: “There’s an art to living,” Thomas told Rosenblatt. “And it has to do with usefulness. I would die content if I knew that I had led a useful life.”

"I believe in the power and mystery of naming things. Language has the capacity to transform our cells, rearrange our learned patterns of behavior and redirect our thinking." Eve Ensler (Thanks Sharon Bray - I got this off your website.)

So many good essays and memoir chapters written in the Advanced Non-Fiction course this spring. The last class was yesterday and I'm going to miss everyone in it.

There are a few spaces
left in my spring writing retreat the weekend of April 30 – May 2, 2010 at the
UCLA Conference Center in Lake Arrowhead, California.I gave a retreat there in November and the Conference Center
turned out to be an ideal place – old, charming, with fireplaces everywhere,
fabulous food and gorgeous views, and free parking. Also a pool and fitness
room. (FYI this retreat is not connected to the Writers’ Program at UCLA
Extension.)

We’ll meet at 1:00 on
Friday for the first workshop and end with lunch on Sunday. The cost is $660
which includes a private room and bath, three meals a day (beginning with dinner on Friday), and the writing
workshop.The workshop is designed
for all levels of writers – both beginners and experienced – and consists of
inspiration, guidelines for fiction and non-fiction, writing exercises, reading
your work aloud for feedback and also stretches of private time for
writing.Plus one-on-ones with me.
It’s a wonderful way to jump into a project you’ve been dreaming about for a long
time, or to make serious headway on a work in progress. A bonus is that you
become part of a writing community – the participants in the last retreat
formed their own writing group and now meet once a month. (I think this is one
of the most valuable things about going on a retreat or taking a course. You
get to know other people’s work in a very intimate way and have the tools for
forging ontogether without an
instructor.) Another bonus: Rob Daly, www.MeetYourMac.com
is coming to the workshop and will help anyone who has computer problems

Lake Arrowhead is less
than 100 miles from Los Angeles, high in the mountains and the Conference
Center is right on the lake. To secure a place or if you have any questions
please email me at B.Abercrombie@verizon.net.
A deposit of $180 will be required when signing up.

There’s a wonderful debate/discussion going on in Comments under “Editing Notes” (three posts below.) I want to point out that there are two ways to approach creative writing. One way is writing for yourself – a journal, memoir and essays, an autobiography maybe for your family to read some day. Another approach is toward writing a book or an essay to be published. And I do workshops both ways.

At the Wellness Community no one is there to become a professional writer, they’re writing for therapy, for fun –yet who knows where it may go?We do five minutes writing exercises (inspired by published poems and memoir) that are then read aloud and never critiqued; everyone loves hearing what others have written, and are often helped by it. In a million years I wouldn’t point out clichés or anything to edit in that workshop.

In my UCLA Extension workshops it’s different (and that’s where the editing notes came from.)Students are paying a lot of money to learn how to write and to some day to be published. When students read in workshop we first address what’s wonderful about their writing in very specific terms. (No one gets away with “Oh, I just love it.”)What do you like about the writing and why?And then, again in very specific terms, we discuss howto improve the piece – what confused us, what could be cut, what could be added. Honesty and empathy (hey, we’re all in the same boat here) and encouragement are vital.

Again, dear readers, give yourself total freedom in your early drafts (as Anne Lamott calls them “the shitty first drafts”). Let the cute and coy clichés roll, be sentimental, or be obscure and murky, break every guideline or writing rule you’ve ever read or heard. Then – if you want to be published, get some feedback. And if need be, start rewriting and editing.

I’ve gone over my students’ papers one more time (at this point some of my notes make no sense whatsoever.) I try to be aware of each student’s unique voice when I edit and not suggest rewriting to the sound of my own voice.

I know when you’re edited you often think, oh, no that’s not my voice, and you’re sort of outraged that someone would blithely cross out paragraphs of your beloved prose. (I often feel this way.) Well, sometimes it is your voice and sometimes it isn’t. One student’s writing is like an incredible garden – everything is bright and blooming and wonderful except you have to hack your way to get to it. When I edit her work I’m pulling the weeds, pruning the branches. It’s all there; I just want it to show. Another writes wonderfully dramatic scenes – action, dialog, powerful stuff. But then she starts explaining what she just wrote, what she’s feeling and thinking. Her writing is so good that she doesn’t need to do this – it’s all in the action and dialog and descriptions. Another student writes his way into an essay, explaining what he was doing before the story began, and he just doesn’t need that first paragraph. The reader gets it. Remember how smart your readers are. You don’t have to spell things out.(But sometimes you do have to write all that stuff that will be edited out later - it's for you, you're finding your story.)

The class also handed in book proposals for their memoirs– a letter to an agent or editor, a list of the competition and why their book is different, marketing plans and an outline. In all honesty I have to say if I were an agent reading their letters I would not go on to read pages of their memoirs. But the good news is when you go off in the wrong direction it helps you to realize what direction you need to head for. You’ve started, and that’s what’s important. Many described their memoirs as humorous or moving or touching – but these adjectives are for the editor to write on your book jacket, not the author in a query letter. Somehow in your letter you need to get those things across yet remain modest and at the same time convey your excitement about the book. And this is hard. But the most important part of the book proposal homework was that everybody started asking themselves what their book was really about, what was the arc of the memoir, where was it headed, the competition it would face and how to help market it. Sometimes it helps to write a book proposal early, sometimes you need to just write the book and see where it goes. And only you can decide this

Please check out the Comment section from the last post. There’s a very interesting comment from “A Reader” who questioned the post and my comment about never being cute or coy in your writing.Please add your own two cents to the discussion.